Licenses Versus Lawsuits: Why Suno’s Parallel Legal Strategies May Pose a ‘Conundrum’

Two years after the three majors banded together to sue Suno for training its artificial intelligence model on unlicensed music, Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music are still locked in fierce litigation with the leading AI music firm.

At the same time, Suno is making peace with other big players in the music industry.

Warner Music Group (WMG) exited the majors’ copyright lawsuit in November by signing a settlement that requires Suno to develop a new model based on licensed music.

BMG, which was not part of the litigation, then inked a similar deal with the company this month.

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On one hand, it’s arguing in court against UMG and Sony that it doesn’t have to pay for AI training data.

On the other, it is actively paying for training data from two of their biggest competitors.

“Suno may be in a little bit of a conundrum,” says David Martinez , a partner at Robins Kaplan who specializes in intellectual property litigation.

That “conundrum” centers on fair use, the legal principle that allows copyrighted works to be reused for free in certain situations.

Suno, like dozens of other AI companies facing litigation, has argued that fair use allows it to ingest copyrighted music into its model without licenses in order to fuel technological innovation.

At least one U.S. judge has already sided with the AI industry on this in a case brought by book authors against Anthropic, the company behind popular chatbot Claude.

In the Suno case, however, a U.S. judge has not yet decided whether fair use applies to training on unlicensed music (though a German court said in a landmark ruling last month that it does not).

One of several important factors that courts consider when deciding fair use is what is known as “market impact” — whether the new use deprives a copyright holder of current or potential income.

UMG and Sony have argued that Suno’s licenses with other music companies are evidence of AI music’s market impact, with their lawyers writing in an April court filing that the WMG settlement “bears directly” on that question.